Nipissing University’s Michael DeGagne, the first aboriginal president of a Canadian university, aspires to be more than a precedent-setter.

Every time
Michael DeGagne
makes a public presentation, someone comes up and asks: “What can I do to help?”

He doesn’t have a good answer — and it haunts him.

DeGagne is the first
aboriginal president
of a Canadian university. The Fort Frances native assumed the leadership of Nipissing University in January following a 25-year career in the public service, first as a senior negotiator at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, then as director of First Nations and Inuit Health Programs for Health Canada, finally as executive director of the
Aboriginal Healing Foundation
(a forerunner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission).

He is articulate, approachable and fuelled by a powerful sense of mission. He aims to create an outlet for the goodwill of Canadians. “I feel that is incumbent on us as aboriginal people.

“I could say, I want you to go home and I want you to mail me $20. I can collect at lot of twenties but it’s not going to make the broad social change that I am looking for.”

His long-term plan is to make Nipissing University home to a well-organized, highly credible Aboriginal Institute. It will bring together the best minds in the country to offer Canadians evidence-based solutions to the problems plaguing many First Nations.

His shorter-term objective is to make the university a living model of reconciliation, a place where aboriginal and non-aboriginal students learn from one another, tackle problems together and work toward a shared Canadian identity.

To kick things off, DeGagne has begun a new tradition. Every year, Nipissing will provide first-year students with a slim
book of essays
entitled
Speaking My Truth
. It is a collection of reflections from students of native residential schools, Canadians of Japanese descent
interned
during the Second World War and members of other minorities that have been excluded, stigmatized and left to struggle with the pain. “This is our way of indigenizing the institution,” DeGagne says. “It is our way of having academics engage with students around a common theme.”

At the moment, only 350 of the 5,500 students attending Nipissing are aboriginal. DeGagne hopes to boost the number. But his first priority is to make sure every aboriginal student attending Nipissing stays and graduates.

Some need no external motivation. They, like DeGagne, a member of
Northwest Angle 37
First Nation, grew up in homes where education was valued and stressed. DeGagne’s father was a teacher, his mother a nurse. They expected their children to go to university. (All four did — three earned multiple degrees.)

But most aboriginal students fight to get to university and struggle to fit in when they arrive. “We have a group of students that is largely misunderstood by others in the academy,” DeGagne says. “Our aboriginal student population is defined by its dysfunction, by how it has failed in the past, by the levels of academic achievement it has not reached.”

He considers it Nipissing’s responsibility to provide the support they need. “We reach as far back as we can into the school system and continually build small bridges so that aboriginal students can be brought along.”

A few, he hopes will stay at Nipissing to “help us to establish an evidence base for what goes on in universities.”

It is an ambitious agenda. But DeGagne is confident the faculty and students of Nipissing can handle it.

The university already has a highly regarded
School of Education
with a network of teaching graduates across the North. That gives it a head-start in reaching out to aboriginal communities.

It also has the advantage of being a relatively
young university
. It still has the flexibility to experiment and the opportunity to carve out its role as a modern northern university.

These challenges excite DeGagne. He is honoured to have been chosen to lead Nipissing, but he wants to be known for what he did, not for his precedent-setting appointment.

Carol Goar
’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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